Office 365 – More Than Word! Part 2 (Webinar)

Recently we held a webinar showcasing some of the latest features that Microsoft Office 365 has to offer. (Watch Part 1 here). Watch Part 2 above to delve further into Office 365 to discover how the apps and functionalities blend together to help you work more productively. If you think Office 365 is your old-school Word/Outlook/Powerpoint combo, you’re in for a pleasant surprise when we demo a few more of the apps you may already own!

TRANSCRIPT

Jess: The slide didn’t wanna go forward. Sorry about that. So first off, just a little bit about the GoToWebinar panel, you’re gonna see that on the right side. It’s usually on the right side. If you wanna pop that out of the way to see more of the presentation you just click that little orange arrow. And if you want it to pop back out, you’ll wanna do that if you wanna ask a question. You just do that by popping it right into this Questions pane and hitting Send.

We ask that you submit your questions this way because we’ve got a lot of great content. We wanna leave plenty of time at the end for Q&A and we wanna make sure our presenter doesn’t get guided down any rabbit holes. So if you don’t mind just popping those in there, I will be collecting those behind the scenes and then feed those to our presenter at the end. And we will make sure to do our best to get to every single one of them, but please do bear in mind that if your question is not responded to, if we do come up against our time, or if there are just conversations that do tend to go a little bit further than just a simple answer, we are more than happy to take those questions offline.

I will absolutely be giving the information of our presenter today. You’ll have access to her via email. We can even set up a quick call if necessary, so no problems there. Just wanna make sure that even if your question is a little bit more involved we will absolutely make sure to address it.

And I do know that it looks like most of the names on here are very familiar here to Encore, however, we do see a couple of new ones. So just quickly about us, we’ve been serving Microsoft Dynamics customers for over 25 years. We’re one of the Gold Partners in Canada, and we’ve got over 130 certified professionals across Dynamics, the AX, GP, NAV, Dynamics 365, Power BI, and quite a few other areas. There’s a cute list of our awards over there to the right. We’ve had a lot of great accolades, not only from Microsoft but also from other very well-known organizations throughout the country.

And then also the solutions we provide. I know that a lot of you on the call are familiar with those applicable to you, but you might not know that we also have quite a few offerings in BI, which is something that we’re gonna talk about today. We also…a lot of deep expertise in various areas of ERP and CRM. So we can absolutely talk to you about any of these others if you’re curious. As I said, you’ll be getting some contact information after this presentation as well as a link to the recording, and contact information about just for different resources. So please feel free to use those if any of those do look interesting to you.

And some of our locations. I don’t know if many of you know that Encore just acquired another company out of the Pacific-Northwest U.S., so we now have locations in Winnipeg, Canada, which is our headquarters, Calgary, Vancouver, and now Seattle and Portland. So we are serving quite a good geography, but we are absolutely home and heart is in that Southern Canada, Pacific-Northwest area. And today’s presenter, Tracey Santos, I think maybe some of you do know Tracey. She’s an excellent resource to talk about Office 365, amongst many other topics. She’s one of our account executives here, and I do have her information there but I will absolutely be following up with a bit more when we conclude.

Tracey, just wanna make sure your audio sounds good. Can you hear me okay? Oh, you might be muted. Are you there, Tracey?

Tracey: Oh, I’m here. Sorry, I didn’t know if you were asking the audience or me. I apologize, I am here, yes.

Jess: Not a problem. I’m gonna hand this presentation over to you. You’re gonna see that window pop up.

Tracey: Great, fantastic. Thanks, Jess. So last time we got together…good afternoon, everyone. Super excited to present to you today on some more items for Office 365. The last day when we were together I kind of ran out of time. I think I chose too many topics to try and cover in that short amount of time, so today I’m really sticking to two main areas with some additional information, as well as maybe reviewing some of the things that we talked about last day.

As I was preparing for this webinar today, I was really thinking about explaining and being able to provide information around why we would move from our normal on-premise Office applications that we’ve had historically in all of our organizations to Office 365, which is a subscription based service. The last day we did talk about lots of the great functions and features that it can provide depending on your licensing.

And I was really thinking about something today that I had read many years ago, moving from busy to productive, and that really resonated with me when I think about Office 365, and how do I move from being busy to being productive? Often times when we work in silos or we work in applications that can’t communicate with each other we find ourselves doing the work maybe twice or three times, or entering something again, or sending out something. Or now I send Jess a file and Jess puts it on her laptop, and I send that same file to Melissa and she save it on her laptop. And then I make a change and I have to go email that again and all of a sudden there are 75 versions or copies of that same file.

Now wouldn’t it be easier if we could just all work on that same file? So those are the types of benefits when we think about moving from our traditional Outlook or Office products to Office 365, because we can look at these products and they all communicate effectively with each other, which is really, really important. And we want to become much more productive because we know the data is coming fast and furious and our companies are growing, and we need to be able to manage that information.

So today I’m gonna start with…I don’t have a PowerPoint today. Everyone’s going, “Yay,” and clapping. We’re going to just go directly into demo but I just wanted to chat a little bit about Teams. So I’m gonna start with Microsoft Teams, which basically takes a variety of components of the apps within Office 365 and combines them together. And using Microsoft Teams can really increase your productivity and allow us to move from being busy to be productive.

So I’m just going to give you a little bit of overview about this before I start with the demo. So trends in collaborative teamworks. So again, Microsoft doing research on how people work. So as your business becomes increasingly global and cross-functional, silos are breaking down. So we talked about those silos. Connectivity is increasing and teamwork is becoming key to organizational success. Employees are on twice as many teams as five years ago. The amount of time employees spend in collaborative work, in meetings, on phone calls, or answering emails has increased by about 50%.

Perhaps even more significantly, this kind of work now takes up 80% or more of an employee’s time. So you can imagine how many meetings you would have in a week, you know? Or how many conference calls you have, or when you have to fly somewhere for a meeting.

So in addition, teams are increasingly a mix of employees and outside vendors. Teams have remote members, either working from home, on the road, or because they are in different geographical regions. So again, just as your company grows you’ll come across those opportunities to, how do you enable in your resources to work in a collaborative way? And I’m really gonna try to say collaborative correctly this time. I listened to the video and I couldn’t pronounce it last time, so I’ll work on that.

So that’s why Microsoft came out with Teams. So Microsoft Teams is a chat-based workspace in Office 365 that addresses these trends. Microsoft Teams gives team members easy access to the information they need in a dedicated hub design from the ground up for teamwork. The modern day chat environment keeps everyone in the know and complete chat history, whether across the team or in private chat. So again, all of that information is there. You don’t have to go searching and looking through emails, or trying to remember what that phone call was about. When we’re having those conversations they can be recorded and reviewed later, and that chat history is available.

In Microsoft Teams everything that a team needs, chat, content, people, and tools, all live in the same Team workspace. So it’s easy access to everyday apps the team relies on, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint. And it’s integrated with Office 365, giving you quick access regardless of what device they’re using. So again, it’s device agnostic in allowing you to work from anywhere that you might be with your device.

So I just wanna touch on security. So lastly, Microsoft Teams provides a great collaborative collaboration experience while upholding our commitments to safeguard customer and user data. Microsoft Teams was designed with compliance, authentication, and privacy in mind, with support for industry standards, strong security measures including two-factor authentication, hard passwords, and access policies. Your data is always encrypted, whether it’s in chat, notes, or files. In short, it’s your data, you own it, and you control it. I think that is very important. People are often wondering about that. “Hey, if I’m gonna go up into the cloud and use Office 365, what about my data and how am I protected?” So again, I wanna make sure we emphasize that and that’s really important.

So I wanna just show you the couple of different interfaces for Microsoft Teams. So the person I’m gonna be working as today, we all remember her from last time, Megan Bowen, that’s who I am today. And one of my team members is Lidia. So Lidia has accessed Teams from Google, so she’s using Google as her internet access point. I don’t wanna say Internet Explorer but that’s how she’s accessing the information on the internet, and she likes using Google. And so there’s Lidia there.

Now for example, Megan today, Megan could go in through her Office 365 interface and go ahead and click on Teams. But she’s actually loaded the desktop app for Teams, so she’s gonna be using that today. So again, that ability to have it on your desktop as an application, on your phone, on your tablet, using whichever browser that you might want to use.

So just a little bit about Microsoft Teams and how it’s available. So it’s available to Office 365 commercial customers with Business Essentials, Business Premium, Enterprise E1, E3, and E5 plan. So again, if you have any questions about your licensing or wanna know more, or you’re interested in getting Office 365, I hope that you’ll reach out to us so we can help you out with that.

So again, it runs Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and web platforms, and it can be accessed in a browser or the desktop application, which we just saw there for those two different personas. They were able to access it either way. So today I’m marketing manager Megan Bowen, and I’m keeping my team busy, focused, and productive with Microsoft Teams. The range of access options allow the team to collaborate from anywhere.

So project team member Lidia Holloway prefers using Team through her web browser as she works on the go, while Megan uses the desktop application, which we saw. So we can go ahead, and we’re gonna go ahead now and create a team. So I’m on here and I can create a new team, add members, channels, conversations, and content, and it’s closely integrated with Microsoft groups. When a team is created, a corresponding group is also created. Likewise if you have an existing Microsoft group, you can associate a team or retain your existing group content.

Megan recently became manager of a major product launch initiative and like to pull together a team. She creates a new sales project team and invites some team members. So again, there’s a variety of ways you can do that. So from here, I can go ahead and say Teams, and right-click and say Create team, or I can go ahead and say Add a team. So we’re gonna go ahead and Create a team, and then we need a name. So we’ll go ahead and create a name for this, and we’ll call it Sales Project Team 1. And I’m gonna put a description in here, so again, if anyone’s looking at that they’ll understand what this team is all about.

All right, I spelled that wrong. I could’ve used the Corrector, couldn’t I? “And discussions for members of the sales project team.” So again, lots of free-from text that you can put in there, and I spelled that wrong again. I don’t know why I’m so nervous today. Privacy, so again, you’ve got that ability, as we were talking about earlier, is Microsoft Teams can be for internal, or maybe I’m working with some external customers or vendors. So I can determine is it private and only I can add members, or can anyone in my organization be able to do that?

So again, it recognizes me as the admin, and so I wanna go ahead and say yes, I wanna add the Microsoft Teams functionality. So this is a very cool component of this is it allows me to determine…I’ve got some other groups, and where do I want this to be able to be part of that group, and as well as Teams? So I’m just gonna go ahead and create that team. Go ahead and got that, and so we created that.

Now we need to go and add some members. So I wanna add some people to this group, so who’s going to be in my group? Well, I think I’m gonna add Alex, and Lidia, and Isaiah. And I can simply add that. Now I can add as many members as I want, and it can be already…so they are already on that team because I’ve done this before. So they’re already there, and we can go ahead and go back to our Product Launch group.

And now we wanna start a new conversation, because we’re just starting off this group and I wanna welcome everyone here. So I’m gonna go ahead and say, “Hello, and welcome to the new sales project team. We can use this area to collaborate.” I guess I don’t have to worry about the spelling mistakes. So there, I can go ahead and send that off and press Enter. And so it’s a new message.

Now if I go over and I click on Lidia’s interface, we can see right away that there’s a new conversation. Go back to my Teams Product Launch Event. I’ve got lots of messages going on here. There we go. So we’ve got messages going back and forth between Lidia and Megan. So again, that updates that right away, and we can respond back and forth. So I’m gonna go back to my Marketing conversation. So here’s my conversations, and we were able to go in and welcome people, and Lidia responded back to me. Then I was able to say, “Great, well, I wanna be able to share out some content with Lidia as well.”

So we went and we shared out a PowerPoint presentation with her as well. So the ability to communicate back and forth on those teams in that content conversation is available back and forth. So I’ll just show you how we went ahead and put in that information in there, and I also had a phone call with her so I can go ahead and start this new conversation.

When you’re in a conversation you can actually go and edit that conversation as well. So if you wanted to edit it, make some changes there, you could also maybe doing a new conversation. You actually wanna have it to meet now. So instead of me messaging back and forth, I can go ahead and say, “Great, I wanna have a meeting.” You can turn your camera on or off. You could also schedule a meeting from here. So for example, maybe I wanna meet now. I can add my subject. Or I can go and Schedule a meeting. So we’re got the ability to Meet now or Schedule a meeting. So I click on Meet now. It’s gonna go off and start Skype, and I’m gonna be able to go and communicate out to Lidia back and forth.

So I’m just gonna end that call because we’re not gonna have the call right now. But again, it keeps track of that. So all of our…perhaps we’re working on a project together, we’re on this team. I’ve shared out a PowerPoint with you, I wanna get some feedback on that. I can have a phone call with you. You can also add in different applications. So for example, I loaded Asana to be part of this team so that I could keep track of activities and tasks that were done. So we’ll just go in and we’ll show you how to go and add some additional applications so that you can share out things. So for example, if you had…could be SurveyMonkey, or it could be different social media type applications, you can connect that with your team so you can get feedback immediately from that.

As well as my Conversations, I can upload files. So here I uploaded that PowerPoint file so that the team has access to it. So again, instead of emailing out that PowerPoint application, or saving it. Now I could save it on OneDrive and share that out but when I come to this Marketing Team I know that all the assets that I need to carry out my work are all available to me here. So all available right there from that Team’s site. I won’t bother opening that. Oh, that’s right, that’s what I was gonna show, right?

So you can actually go and create this as a tab. So again, I don’t have to come and look at the file list. So often times I might have a list of a variety of different files here. So instead of having to search or hunt through that list of files I actually can make a tab. The tab is actually that PowerPoint. So again, now I can have that file, whether it be a PowerPoint document, a Word document, Excel file, where we can actually collaborate here directly on that new tab that is that PowerPoint application.

So again, that conversation is carried in the Conversation tab, but now we can actually collaborate and work on this together. Launch Planning, so I began another conversation about Launch Planning. And oh yeah, the tasks here. So I create a to-do. So not only were we working together on a PowerPoint application presentation, but I also created another component of the team with Launch Planning. And so I can add in my tasks. So I create a new task, and I can set a due date on that. So perhaps I’ll make it for Friday, and I wanna assign it to someone. I’m gonna assign it to Alex. Thank you, Alex.

And Lidia’s got her task here that is due on a certain day. And it is in progress, so this particular activity is due on the 10th and it’s been assigned to Alex. Don’t wanna assign it to anyone else.

Great, so we’ve been able to add in some tasks, and we’re gonna go in and look at our…back to our Conversations and our activity here. You’re gonna wanna add a tab here, so this is where I wanna show you we can add in those other applications. So for example, I added that PowerPoint file as one of the tabs. But again, here are the other things I can connect with. So for example, if I wanted to connect with Hootsuite, or maybe I wanna connect with Jira in the cloud, or SurveyMonkey.

So there’s lots of social media as well as different types of planning boards or activity boards, for example, Asana, that can connect to different application’s websites, etc. So yes, we’ve got our normal Excel, and PowerPoint, Planner, Word, OneNote that we can attach. But we can also attach other applications into my particular team board. So that’s where you would add those tabs there.

And here I’ve attached the Planner, which is also part of Office 365, so that, for example, even though I’ve got these variety of teams, I can go to a planning board and see all of the activities that need to be done for this particular team, as well as all the other planning boards. I could look at everything altogether. Sometimes I get so excited about doing these demos I get lost in my notes here, and I wanna make sure I haven’t missed out any of these great components. So I wanna just touch base back on those connectors.

So in addition to services like Planner, Microsoft Teams is integrated with a wide selection of project management apps, social feeds, and data visualization tools via connectors. So that’s the connector we were just on. So for example, I could connect to Twitter RSS feeds, or Asana. So we had brought up the tasks from Asana and Visual Studio Team Services where the team was tracking various project related activities. So although they were updating it in Visual Studio it would update it here in Teams. So connectors put updates directly into the chat stream for a service like Asana that gives team visibility and to when tasks are added or completed.

So third party services can also be added as tabs, allowing team members to interact with the service directly within the team’s interface. So again, there’s no limitation to how many services you can add as a tab into that team. Let me go back here. We were on Teams, now I’m gonna go over to Chat, and I can click on New Chat. Here are some chats that I’ve already had with different people that I’ve been working with.

So up here for searching, there’s a couple of things here that are great to have in a chat stream is ability to search for a particular conversation that you had, or it can start a new chat. Again, it could be an individual, it could be a group, so again, instead of me having to go and email or communicate instant message with a variety of people, I could put a group in here, or I can have a private. So it can be a group chat or it can be individual. So Alex, poor Alex. I keep misspelling your name. And I wanna communicate with a few of the people that are on the team, and then type in my message.

So as we type that in…if I go and look at the other profile, which was Lidia…there’s a bit of a lag there because that was the one I had sent earlier. There’s a bit of a lag but it would show up, obviously, in her conversation string so that she would know what was going on. And remember what we talked about last session is that when an activity happens we could create Flow? So for example, if Lidia knew she was gonna be in a meeting and wasn’t gonna be able to kinda be working on her team site, we could send her a text message or to her mobile device or alert her in another way that there was an update there.

So again, you’ve got that ability to group chat in a team or individually. So we can keep checking in with Lidia and she would be able to either get a notification, we can send a Flow to notify her if she’s not available on her device. Lots of great ability there.

Now this is very interesting, was using this. We can put in a question, so I’m gonna put a question in, and I’m gonna put the same question I already asked. So I can say, “How do I start a video call?” And when you type your question in the T-Bot is gonna go and find out some help for you.

So again, when we’re typing that question, it can, through chat, Megan, myself also has help learning how to use various Microsoft Team features. T-Bot is a chat member that helps team members get the most of out Microsoft Teams. You simply ask a question in a natural language and the T-Bot replies with the most relevant answer.

“Do I add a new team?” And again, how do I create a new team? It’s a little bit more interactive than our normal Help that we’ve had in some of the applications. So that’s our chatting, so we’ve got the ability to do a group chat, individual chat, and also get our help from the T-Bot.

Let’s go to Meetings. We kind of touched on Meetings. I don’t think I’ll go and touch that again. But again, that meetings using Skype, so built-in Skype voice and video capabilities provide ad hoc team meetings anyone can see and join right within the chat stream. Megan can instantly turn a chat into an online call. That call includes video screen sharing, and similar features found in Skype for Business for making meetings engaging and productive. Again, we can either do a Meet now, or you can schedule that meeting as you like. So much like you would do in your Outlook or in your Office 365 mail, we can book those meetings and have those calls.

That search, again, if I’m looking for a particular conversation that we had had, I can go ahead and put “launch” in there and it’s gonna find all the conversations that happen to be there. So that’s in Conversations. Actually I should go back here. This is where we wanna be searching. So if I go click on Conversations, and I click in here and say “launch.” There’s my Conversations. If I click on Files, it’s gonna bring up all the files I that have “launch” in it, etc. So if I had various assets and content in there it’s gonna be able to go and find that through that search, which is very helpful.

So looking at Teams allows me to, again, provide a collaborative environment where everyone can work together. I wanna go back, and we’ll go back to Teams. Again, I’ve just got these two simple teams set up here, that Marketing and the Product Launch Event. When I went into my Marketing, again, it’s tracking all those conversations and the files, and I can have that Planning Board attached in there. So again, very full featured in that sense. Looking at my meetings, seeing what meetings I’ve got scheduled and coming up, so again, I can plan out my day and book those meetings. So scheduling a meeting in here in the chats, and all of my activities that are going on for overall for all of my teams.

So then that’s a quick overview about Teams in general and how can leverage it, again, from any device and whatever browser you wanna use, or the app, and how I was able to converse with Lidia going back and forth. And we can see that information. There’s two new chats that came through and an activity stream there.

So lots of great things to explore and examine there through Teams, and we use Teams a lot internally. I think one of the things I like the most is the fact that even if I’ve saved a file on OneDrive I’m not saving it again here. I’m just providing access to that from here. So when I go and look at my Files, this is actually shared. It’s either going to be shared out or stored, sorry, stored, not shared…stored up on SharePoint or on my OneDrive. So again, it’s linking it back to there. I’m not saving a copy in Teams, and somewhere else, and somewhere else. It’s one file that we’re all sharing and working on collaboratively.

Again, I’ve shared that out. Also what I find very helpful is when we’re having conversations. I didn’t show the emailing capability, but when you’re having those teams you can have emails going back and forth regarding that particular team. And you’ve got that information there, so I don’t have to go searching through my entire…all my emails to try and find that email that was regarding, you know, the product launch. I can simply find that really quickly and easily through going to my teams and doing a search.

This has been very, kind of, you know, sales and marketing. This is the marketing team, our sales team at this fictitious company. But you can imagine using it throughout your organization whether it be an operations, finance, sales, and marketing.

So now we’re gonna go and talk a little bit about Power BI. Power BI, I did a session completely on Power BI. But last time when we got together we didn’t touch on Power BI so I thought it would be kind of interesting to touch on that today. So we’ll just go ahead and minimize that, and we’re gonna go over to Power BI.

So Power BI Desktop is a free tool that you can use. And then Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium can be part of your Office 365 licensing depending on which type of license that you might have. So again, I’m logged on as Megan. You can see Megan’s pictures there, and it lets me know that I am logged in as Megan.

So I’m gonna go through a little bit about Power BI. This one’s an operational board that I’m looking at. So we’re gonna talk about that, we’ll just give you a little bit of blurb about this first before I go and do the demo. So with Power BI, operations teams can monitor all aspects of their business, identify areas that require attention, and gain new insight from their data. Operations can monitor inventory performance with key product indicators to gain insight into product inventory turnover and sales so that they can better meet market demand.

So this report gives the operations organization insight into the important inventory metrics for the worldwide store and warehouse locations. So interesting that the data that’s being surfaced up here, that visual is very pleasing. It can really grab your attention quickly of areas that need addressing. And again, because this is a global company, or the data is based on a global company, very interesting we’ve got that ability to have that power map there so we can see that information.

I’ve got Inventory Performance showing right at the moment. And so the first thing we’ve got is a Chiclet Slicer at the top to filter the report data. So we can review the data for the retail channel by clicking Store. I’m gonna click on Store, and you’ll see that the information changes. So the report shows the average inventory amount and the cost of goods sold across all stores. Right below the amount are the KPIs for inventory Turnover and Inventory Period. So I’ve got that information there in the next section.

Inventory Turnover indicates how many times the inventory is sold over the course of the year. The Inventory Period shows the number of days it took on average to sell the inventory. A lower number is better. Both KPIs are indicators how efficient our organization operates. So we’ve got that quick, really easy. I didn’t have to dig through that information, I didn’t have to flip through pieces of paper to find the data that I’m looking for. And again, easy to change how the format is. We had shown in our Power BI presentation before being able to quickly change it, for example, if I don’t want a pie chart, or I don’t want a bar graph. Maybe I do want the data and the numbers. You can easily and quickly change that.

So I’m gonna go ahead and click de-select Store, and I’m gonna click Reseller. So we can look at the data changes immediately. So the chart on the right shows Order, inventory, and lost sales quantities over the course of a year. So again, I’ve got three metrics, altogether on one graph. So you can see during the holiday season at the end of the year we’re losing significant sales because inventory cannot meet order quantities. So again, that gives us an indicator that, great, we need to have that ability to take into account seasonality when we’re ordering our products. So again, that quickly gives that visual indicator.

I’m gonna take off Reseller. Now we’re gonna go ahead and use the Continent slicer to filter the report for Europe. So again, I’ve got the ability. These are my slicers here, so I’ve got those categories again. So if I wanna drill down and find more information about that. And this is the Continent slicer, so I’m gonna go ahead and pick Europe, and then I’m gonna go ahead and drill into Hamburg.

So again, you can see that data changes. So using the map we can select an individual store or warehouse location to filter the report data down to that level. So we chose Hamburg. The chart on the right shows the Fill rate and Inventory period by product. The Fill rate indicates as a percentage how many orders we’ve fully filled or shipped for a given product. For the Hamburg warehouse, we have a very low fill rate for wall frames and wardrobes, indicating an inventory problem.

So again, I can address that. Where are my wall frames? There we go, Wall frames and wardrobes, and again, you can hover over that. It gives you that different bit of information, that feedback. So the Inventory period chart shows that Floor lamps and Outdoor decor are still moving items are the Hamburg warehouse. Again, I’ve got the ability to see what’s moving and what’s not moving for a particular…and it shows you when I’m hovering there how long that’s been in inventory, how many periods that’s been in inventory.

So again, I can quickly see. It gives me lots and lots of information. So I’m gonna de-select Europe so we’re back on the entire world. With Power BI operations teams we’re gonna go onto another slide here, or another…not another slide but another dashboard. So with Power BI operations teams can monitor all aspects of their business identifying areas that require attention and gain new insight from their data. So operations can gain insight into sales and product analysis as well as supply and demand to help them make the right decisions. So let’s move onto the Sales & Operations Planning.

So again, that was Inventory Performance, again, gave us a view of how our inventory is performing. Now we’re gonna go over and look at the Sales & Operations Planning. So this report gives the operations teams insight in demand and supply performance for the different channels and products. At the top left of our report we have two demand performance indicators, Demand forecast accuracy, and the percentage of Obsolete stock. So currently right now they both look good based on our metrics. Again, those metrics are gonna be unique and individual to every business.

Right below we have two supply performance indicators, the Manufacturing conformance, which indicates how reliable our manufacturing process is or is not. The Delivered in-full, on-time chart shows that only 52% of all orders were fully shipped and on time. That is well below the target. Except mine’s not showing up. It’s supposed to be showing up there. So those are On-time trend. I’m not seeing that there, so my data is not coming through. I apologize for that.

So we’re gonna go and look at Demand forecast accuracy. We’ve got that. Obsolete stock, Manufacturing conformance, 96%, great. Delivered in-full and on-time. Oh, here it was. Sorry, I was looking down here. So here’s where they’ve set the bar. So again, you can see that you’re sending your individual. And so again, you can configure that. So when you’re having your metrics and your data is coming across, you’re choosing your KPIs and what’s acceptable and what’s not. And so quickly anyone in the organization can look at this and go, “Oh, okay. Now I can go and do some investigation and find out why aren’t my orders being fully shipped on time as I’m expecting it to be?”

So over to the right of the report the Demand forecast accuracy chart shows a break down by product. There’s our break down products. Even though the overall accuracy is 96%, we are not forecasting demand for some of our products very well. So for example, Candles or Cocktail Glasses are only at 62 and 60-something percent, so you can see they’re at a lower. And again, I’ve used the heat map to let me know that those are the items that I really need to drill in further and find out what’s going on.

So again, overall, I might be happy with my whole product mix. And as you can see, we move over this way, you can see that we’re doing really, really well in some products, other products not so well. But it gives me that ability to see all that. So over to the right in the Social media sentiment by product chart, we can see that the sentiments for Candles is somewhat mixed, which could be related to their poor demand forecasting and orders not being fulfilled.

So again, we’ve got that feed coming in, again, connecting to whatever applications or services that are gathering that social media sentiment, and allowing us to get immediate feedback about our business. We’ve got that Category slicer, and if I wanted to click on Furniture you can see now all of my KPIs. That information is changing.

So we notice that the manufacturing conformance dropped to 75%, whereas it was 95% before based on that one product. And the Demand forecast numbers look more accurate for some of our other product lines. While our Dining Furniture is perceived as very positive, we’re seeing more neutral sentiments for Bathroom and Outdoor Furniture. So again, you’ve got that ability to delve further into the overall product mix or services that you’re providing and having those categories so that I can then analyze that easier.

And we’ve got our Cost versus revenue by product. Again, as we go and select those different components here the information changes down below so I can analyze that. And you’ve got the ability to open that up to have it on focus mode, ability to drill down on all of this. But I was just gonna give you a high-level overview of what you can do and provide to your team member and all the different decision makers within the organization. Oh my gosh, my time. See? Two topics there, and oh my goodness. I am so sorry, Jess. I know I’ve gotta hurry up here. I just looked at the clock as I’m rambling on here.

Okay, a couple things I wanted to…that will help deployment and adoption of these applications. I just wanna show you something kinda continuing onto our theme about dogs, and dog training, because I’m training my puppy. We talked about, last time we were doing PowerPoint and, sort of…Swerve, was it Swerve? Sway, got my words mixed up.

Collaboratively we’re working on a document. So again, I’m working on this document, but also it’s my coworker. She wants to work on this document as well, so she’s in here and she’s adding some content. And again, I can add some content here, and when I’m over here you can see that I’m also editing, and Lidia’s also editing that. And I can actually chat with Lidia right here in this application. So I’m working in Word Online and I can go and have a chat. “Hi, Lidia. Did you take Bolt for a walk? I am running late.”

And if we go over to…and there’s the message gone to Lidia. So again, I can go ahead and respond to that or ignore that chat. So we’ve got that co-authoring, we’re working on the same document. And if I’m adding something at the same time as Lidia it’ll say, you know, who’s going to be able to accept that, you know? Do you wanna accept Lidia’s content? So very, very interesting there, really like that idea.

Something in here, this isn’t new but it’s new for touch devices. So for example, tablets, or your iPhone, your iPad. I’m sure that most of you have used this before, but if I go and hit, and I hope you can see that. If I go Ctrl+P, my mouse turns to a laser pointer, and also will draw. But if you’re on a touch device, wherever you’re touching with your finger, that can be that laser pointer, or drawing lines on that. So I just wanted to quickly show that, and I don’t wanna keep my ink annotations.

So I thought that was really interesting. There was one other thing I was gonna show you. Oh, I know, from OneNote. When we’re working in OneNote we can, directly from there, make appointments or tasks. So then that ability to be in here and say, “Great, what would I like to do with that?” So I’ve got that ability, so instead of, again, making…maybe it’s a wonder list, to-do list, or I’m making a, you know, list of things that have to be done in OneNote. Or I’m at a meeting and I’m, you know, fiercely taking notes about a meeting. I don’t have to go and re-enter that, I can connect that, too.

So for example, do I need to just go discuss that with someone? You know, it’s a task, when does the task need to be done? That ability to have that emerged in that. And so when we saw it last time we were together as well. Our OneNote can live right inside of our Teams as well.

I wanted to touch on a whole lot more today. I didn’t get a chance to, but I hope that’s given you a little bit more overview of the depth and functionality that Office 365 can bring to you and your team. And really I wanna touch back on that concept of moving from busy to productive, and really gravitating and taking advantage of all the different tools that you have available to you in Office 365. And I’ve only touched on a few, and last day we talked about Flow, and we did touch on Yammer really quickly. We did spend a lot of time on Flow.

Lots and lots of great content. Lots of great resources available online, and I look forward to spending some more time with you all looking at Office 365 a little bit more. And I hope that I’ve given you an overview about Teams and Power BI. So please make sure that you’re trying out Power BI, whether it be connected to your P data source, or your CRM data source, or just an Excel…sorry, yeah, an Excel file. Lots of great flexibility there for your Power BI. You can connect it to a website if it’s got the weather on it, etc. Lots of cool, cool things you can do with Power BI. So I’ll hand it back to you, Jess.

Jess: Awesome, that was great. You know, actually as you’re talking about busy-ness and productivity, there was a quote up, I think I saw it, a client site. And it was one of my favorites now but it says, “Busy-ness does not equate to business.” And I was thinking that as you’re going through this. Absolutely, the transformation from being busy to productivity is such a huge change for a lot of businesses. We did have a couple questions come through, so if you’ve got a minute, Tracey, I’ll just pop these over to you and we can get some of our attendees’ questions answered. The first one is about Teams. It says, “Are the meetings between team members private, or does anyone in that team see and or hear it? Also, is there a history of it?”

Tracey: Great, great question. So when we made the team there was that choice whether I could make it be private, so I was the only one that could invite team members. And then the other one was public, so anyone in the organization could add people. So I would suggest that you make it private so that you’re the only person that can add it. If I have a conversation with you only, obviously if I’m having a group conversation everyone in that group can see it. I’d have to follow up on that, Jess, because I’m not sure, can I have a private conversation that’s saved in a team that no one else can see? I’d have to check that out. I wanna say yes, but I don’t wanna say yes unless I confirm it. So can we just note that down and we’ll find out?

Jess: Absolutely, that’s excellent. The second one also about Teams. It says, “Can you search team conversations like you do in Outlook, like using date ranges, and to, from?”

Tracey: Yes.

Jess: Awesome. That was a simple answer. And then about Power BI, so it says, “We have a lot of data from a lot of different areas. Can we build our own Power BI dashboards, or do we need to engage a partner? We don’t have anyone who knows this yet. Is it better to train or just have a partner do it for us?”

Tracey: I think we’re always taking the perspective that it’s good for us to help you be able to fish for yourself. You know, we wanna help our clients, but we don’t wanna do the work for them. We wanna teach them how to use those tools. So we have a lot of clients that have Office 365 and are starting to use Power BI. And we give them some basic training.

There’s a couple things to think about when we’ve got lots of data, and our BI team can best advise you on whether it’s important to…sometimes we don’t want Power BI to be hitting the data source all the time, and will it take a snapshot? And so they can make the best recommendations when you have large volumes of data. How do you want to optimize that, and how are you gonna surface that up into Power BI?

But that’s a great question. We wanna make sure that you know how to use the tool set. Because if we do it or your partner, not necessarily it’s gonna be us. But if your partner always holds the power you’re never gonna learn and feel like you can really stand behind that product and really taking confident about taking ownership of it. And I think that’s always been an Encore value is making sure that our clients can take ownership of their solutions.

Jess: That’s very well said. Excellent. And that is the last question so far. We’ll just give people one more minute to kind of gather their thoughts and possibly add something else. So just very quickly I wanted to show just some resources here that we have for you. And also, as I mentioned before, having a little bit more information about some of the webinars that we have coming up.

So these are some of the resources we just threw together for you about Microsoft Teams, about Power BI. Power BI, there’s a “Get it free!” link that does get it. Just have it available to you immediately. I believe there’s a light tutorial there. There’s also plenty of the videos that go over some of the basics. Microsoft’s very big about adding those videos to YouTube and then having plenty of links throughout their website. So these might get you started if you want a little bit more hands-on self-tutorial.

And then about the webinars, we do have a couple coming up by the end of the year. We have “Overview of Dynamics 365 for Finance & Operations, Business Edition.” I’m not sure if any of you have been thinking about that new jump but that is a newer product coming out, and there’s a lot more information about it as well as a pretty interesting demo.

We also have “What’s New in Dynamics GP 2018” coming up in December. There’s a lot of information that’s gonna be launched about that very soon for Microsoft. We hope to capture as much of it as possible and give you a good look.

And then we have a ton of other webinars coming out throughout 2018, as I mentioned, every other week. We are gonna be giving you a lot of information about those webinars in our newsletter. If you’re not signed up for our newsletter, you don’t believe you’re receiving it, you can just pop me a note even in this Questions pane available to you in the Chat pane here, or I will be sending you in a follow-up email about this webinar soon after. And you can just respond to me and make sure you get that newsletter. It’s gonna be a really easy, once-a-month in your inbox way to find out what’s coming up throughout the month, and even the next month. And make sure you get signed up before we hit our registration caps.

We’ll also have a page on our website that you can always take a look at when you feel inclined to do so, and that will be fully launched by the beginning of the year. And so I don’t see any other questions come through. Here, once again, is Tracey’s information. I think Tracey would echo me that you’re always welcome to reach out, especially with questions about what we saw today. And as I said, I will have a follow-up email for you with the deck from today, which I know is very few slides but does have some of all of that information.

I’ll have a link to the recording of today’s webinar and then just a little bit more information. Feel free to respond to that if you have any questions or suggestions about our webinar series. We really want this to be super valuable to you and make sure that your time is very well spent, so your feedback is very much appreciated. Tracey, thank you so much for some great content. That was exciting stuff and I’m actually gonna go jump into Teams and poke around a little bit more.

Tracey: Well, I’m looking forward to working on Teams with you, Jess, because I think it can really add a lot of value and make us a lot more productive as a company for Encore. And that’s what it makes it easy, I think, for us to evangelize about Office 365 is because we use it so much. So I hope you got something out of this today, everyone, and I look forward to connecting with all of you at any time.

Jess: Excellent. Thank, everybody, and hopefully we will see you on another webinar soon. Have a great day.

18 Warning Signs You Need The Cloud

If your business experiences these red flags, your diagnosis is clear: time to adopt the cloud!

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18 Warning Signs You Need The Cloud

Author

Tracey Santos

Tracey Santos is one of the most enthusiastic and passionate evangelists for Microsoft Dynamics you’ll meet. Since 1996, she has helped many organizations envision their ideal business solution, define their objectives, automate their processes and realize powerful improvements through tailored Microsoft Dynamics GP solutions. Tracey is also an experienced CGA who has worked across numerous industries giving her an exceptional ability to support customers.